The Portal's Edge
by DangerousMuteLunatic
Summary: When Chell escaped Aperture, she didn't expect the surface world to be monitored as well.  Faith had no idea that the companies poisoning her world could be so horrible.  The two women join together to protect their world and uncover a shocking secret.
1. Flight

Wind blew back her short, choppy black hair as she ran. She was twenty stories up in a blank, white landscape. She leapt gaps and climbed rails, performing feats that even a circus performer would have found terrifying. That is, if there were any circuses around anymore. She jumped from one building to another that was four floors shorter. Undeterred, she tumbled as she hit the roof top, then popped up again and kept running. A single misplaced step could send her plummeting to her demise, and yet…

And yet she felt the most alive she had in ages.

This, these rooftops, this was her home. She could run them forever and never tire, never bore. She grinned as she used a pair of stacked boxes to launch herself up, where she grabbed hold of a cable. She slid down it, barely suppressing a joyful shriek of "Wa-hoo!" Releasing at the perfect moment, her fall was cushioned by a soft stack of cardboard. She stood and caught a glimpse of herself in a reflective window. Dark, wild, tattooed, mysterious, beautiful. The sound of gunfire made her spring into action. Not even turning around, she jumped and slid down a slanted window, laughing as glass broke behind her.

This is the life.

0 0

She stumbled wearily into a bleached city. Occasional flashes of orange and blue terrified her to no end. People stared at her strange clothes and even stranger possessions. Suddenly, she spotted something black and red high above her. Used to cameras and deadly robots, she ducked into an alley and searched, hidden, for the source of said colors. High above her head, a woman, no older than herself, stood at the very edge of a building, oblivious to her curious onlooker.

Suddenly, the woman on the rooftop spotted her. Their eyes met. Despite the distance between them, each saw something in the other's eyes that knew they could trust them til the ends of the earth. Each showed age and wisdom far beyond their years.

The higher girl called out, "Can you Run?"

_Run? I've been running for as long as I can remember._ Confused, she nodded.

A wide smile broke out on the other woman's face. "Come on up!"

How? There was no elevator, no stairs. Just a few pipes. Oh, but there was a white concrete wall next to the woman.

_Piece of cake._


	2. Silent Chell

One moment the girl in orange was there, staring up, confused, and the next she wasn't. Faith peered into the alley, searching for where she might have gone.

She felt a hand on her shoulder. Grabbing her attacker's wrist, she twisted and pinned them down.

There was the stranger. Looking terrified, and rightfully so. Faith's elbow was centimeters away from crushing her windpipe.

Faith stood, not bothering to brush the grime from her less-than-white pants. She extended a hand to the stunned-looking young woman, who ignored it and leapt to her feet.

Faith blinked in surprise. The movement was fast and precise. Could this girl be a Runner? Surely they would've met.

"My name's Faith," she said suspiciously. "Faith Connors. What's yours?"

The girl put a hand to her throat and opened her mouth. No sound came out.

"Can't you speak? Oh, I'm sorry."

The other woman knelt and scraped something into the dirt. Faith leaned in to see it. In chicken-scratch writing, a single word was etched in the gravel.

_Chell._


	3. Showing Off

"Chell?" Faith asked.

Chell nodded, pointing to the word, then to herself, as though saying, _yes, that's my name._

"How did you get up here, Chell?" Faith gazed down the side of the building, trying to see a path fast enough. Even she couldn't climb up that quickly.

Chell tilted her head. Wasn't it obvious? _Oh, right. Of course Aperture hasn't released that precious technology to the public._ She pointed to the wall behind Faith, who turned…

And shrieked. "What _is_ that?" She stared at the glowing blue oval on the wall.

Chell gestured to the image of the alley beyond the portal. Faith still looked confused, so Chell gave a little demonstration. She stepped through the portal and into the alley. Going to the far wall (closest to the building Faith was on), Chell placed two fingers to her lips and gave a loud, shrill whistle.

On the building, Faith jumped, startled, at the sound. She ran to the edge and stared into the alley. _How could she have gotten there so fast?_ She had only stepped through…

Chell whistled again to get Faith's attention. She pointed to Faith, then to the blue portal, then to the orange one that was barely visible in the shadows of the alley. _Come through!_

Faith eyed the portals suspiciously. Chell had passed through them safely enough, but was there a trick to it? If there wasn't… she gave in and jumped through the blue portal, rolling as she hit the ground on the other side. There was a slight temperature change between the portals, maybe a little tingle, but Faith landed in the alley with all of her limbs intact.

Chell rolled her eyes at her cohort's dramatic entrance. She picked up the ASHPD from where she had left it on the ground and showed it to Faith with a flourish.

Unfortunately, Faith mistook the Device for a gun. Shocked that Chell would dare pull a weapon against her, she seized the barrel and white grips with both hands, shoved Chell to the ground, and aimed the Device directly at the fallen woman's heart.

Chell's eyes widened from her place in the dust. She had no idea what would happen if a human was shot with a portal, but it wouldn't be pretty. Rolling aside, she stood and put a betrayed expression on her face. Still, she couldn't help but be impressed by Faith's reflexes. Extending her hands, she gestured for Faith to return her ASHPD.

Faith was examining the Device carefully, unsure of how it worked. It didn't seem to be a gun, and she certainly had no idea how to load or fire it. Shrugging, she returned it to Chell, who mounted it on her arm, expertly fitting it over her wrist and supporting the base with her left hand.

Chell moved the orange portal to another wall with a flash. She returned to the roof and whistled another time, waving her non-ASHPD arm for good measure.

Faith looked up, now enthralled by her mysterious new friend. _What else could the strange girl do?_

Chell was eager to demonstrate the things she had learned. Tightening her black-and-white boots, she backed up and took a running leap off of the building.

Down below, Faith was terrified. No tumble, Runner or no, could recover from a fall that far. She watched helplessly as the girl in orange plummeted to what should have been her doom. Faith braced herself for the soft, squashy _crunch_ of a body hitting the concrete.

She wasn't expecting Chell to right herself in midair and land neatly on her feet, like a cat. She stood and grinned like a maniac. _Ta-da!_

That was when Faith fainted.


	4. Watching

**[A/N: Double update, but short. Sorry. The "shocking secret" mentioned in my clever and well-written summary (I crack myself up) will show up soon. Probably.]**

When the Runner finally came to, she lay on a rooftop. It wasn't the same building as before, but instead one a few blocks away. Even with that weird gun of hers, Faith was surprised that Chell could have brought her this far. The second she sat up, Chell grabbed the straps of Faith's black tank top and shook her like a dog.

Chell dragged a startled Faith to the side of the roof. While the local was out, the former test subject had noticed something that terrified her more than a thousand turrets, more than a room full of mashy spike plates. Seizing a handful of short black hair, she pointed forcefully at something on the side of a building across the way.

"A camera? Yeah, they're all over the place. You get used to them, I guess. They only put them in a few years ago, and-" Faith was cut off by another sharp shake by Chell. The wild-eyed woman was frantically pointing to the camera… no, not the camera, something on the camera? Then she saw it. A tiny logo was printed on the side of the camera's white shell. Anyone could pass by it and hardly notice. Even to Faith it meant nothing. It was just eight tiny triangles arranged in a circle.

Chell knew better, though.

It was Aperture's logo.

They were the ones watching over the city.

Or rather, She was the one watching.

**[A/N: Gah! The shortness! Keep reviewing, and remember: Courage is Not the Absence of Fear!]**

**DMLunatic out! Peace!**


	5. Who?

**[A/N: Does it still count as a triple update if the third installment is updated in the wee, wee hours of the morning?]**

_No. No, no, no, no, NO! _Just when she thought she was free, when she thought she was alone, far from Her ever-watchful eye, She had to just come along and ruin it. With no small amount of zeal, Chell blasted a portal at the awful camera, knocking it off of the wall.

"_Vital Testing Apparatus destroyed._"

Oh god. That can't be good. Picking up the camera with the ASHPD's tractor beam, Chell listened for it to speak again. She hoped that it had just been an automatic response, but no such luck.

"_Oh, it's __**you**__. Hello again, [SUBJECT NAME HERE]. You know I can't let you mess up my little experiment, don't you? I'll have to fix that. Please assume the Party Escort Submission Position._"

Chell responded by flinging the camera off of the building and into several lanes of traffic.

"What the hell was that all about?" Faith spoke up. Chell jumped. She had forgotten that she wasn't alone. She faced Faith and tried, in vain, to pantomime what Aperture was and how she wound up there. Suddenly…

"_Now, is that any way to treat an old friend?_" Her voice was all around them now, echoing off of the buildings. "_Of course, neither is MURDER, but I suppose you were never the most social person. It might have something to do with the fact that your parents abandoned you on a doorstep._" Had Chell not been frantically looking around for the source of Her voice, she would have been grinding her teeth in frustration.

"Blues!" Faith warned suddenly. Sure enough, police officers were swarming the rooftop, rappelling down from helicopters they hadn't heard approach. There was something unnatural about these cops, however. They all moved in sync with each other, with jerky, uncoordinated movements.

"_You could have lived your life peacefully in my little Eden, but no, you had to be a monster. Well, lucky for me you decided to tell me where you are._"

The Blues all froze as a unit and raised their respective weapons. Faith jumped to disarm one, knocking him to the ground, but he just lay there, stiff, in the same position he had been in when standing.

"What the-"

Every last cop pulled their trigger. There were no bullets, but instead the women could clearly hear the hiss of gas.

"Shit." Faith summed up the situation in one word.

The wicked voice used two. "_Sleep tight_."

As for Chell? She had three. _Damn it, GLaDOS._

…

Faith awoke in some sort of glass bed. She sat up so fast she hit her head on the dome that arced over her. It slid aside, and she jumped out, ready to face anything.

Anything, that is, except the enormous tangle of machinery hanging down from the ceiling that was, for lack of a better word, _glaring_ at her.

"_Well, look at that. The red one is up already._" The voice was the same as the one she had heard on the rooftop! Faith's cunning mind quickly assessed the situation and finally came up with an incredible conclusion.

This computer… was… the bad guy. Yeah… _Brilliant deduction, Sherlock._

Faith stood in a room of frosted glass, with two glass bed pod thingys and a toilet. One pod was empty, as she had just come from it. The other…

"Chell!" she called, banging on the dome over her sleeping friend.

"_Oh, silly little human. [SUBJECT NAME HERE] cannot hear you. She is in stasis, as you were moments ago._"

Faith glared at the metal monstrosity's orange light, which seemed an awful lot like an eye. "What do you want from me?"

"_Isn't it obvious? Well, I suppose from a __**human**__ standpoint, it would be a bit confusing. Allow me to explain. I am the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System, more commonly known as GLaDOS._"

"'Disk Operating System'?" Faith snorted. "So you're, what, a huge CD player?"

"_SILENCE!_" GLaDOS' voice boomed through the chamber. "_As I was saying,_" She continued, suddenly calm again, "_I run Aperture Laboratories, and by extension, your puny little world._"

The AI tipped her "head" for a moment, pondering. "_You know, there is someone who should be here for this. No, not __**her**__,_" She added irritably as Faith started towards Chell's stasis pod, "_someone else, who I believe you know quite well. Or at least, you think you know._"

The wall behind GLaDOS opened and another glass box/room pushed forward into the main chamber. This one was much smaller than the one Faith was in, and contained a single person standing pressed against the glass. Faith's breath caught in her throat.

"Kate?"

**[A/N: Ahahahaha! Cliffhanger, hangin' from a cliff! Duh duh duhduh DUH DUH! duhduhduh duh duh DUH DUH DUH! Just a little adventure music there. But seriously, why would Kate be down in Aperture Labs? What does GLaDOS want with a Runner and her cop sister? WHY IS DMLUNATIC ASKING ALL THESE RHETORICAL QUESTIONS? Find out next time, in our next exciting installment of **_**The Portal's Edge!**_**]**


	6. Shocks

"Kate!" Faith cried out to her sister.

In her transparent prison cell, Kate pressed against the wall even more. Her lips moved, but she couldn't be heard through the thick -and probably reinforced- glass. "Faith", she mouthed.

Faith directed all of her fury at GLaDOS. "What the hell do you want from us? You can hurt me all you like, but. No one. Hurts. My. Sister!"

"_Oh, believe me; I will hurt you all I want. And your… sister… as well. We'll start. With. Her."_

Oh god, no! Arcs of electricity shot through Kate's body, apparently generated by the awful box. She screamed soundlessly, completely muted by the walls.

"No! Leave her alone! She hasn't done anything to you!" Faith pounded the walls, desperately trying to break the glass.

"_In a way, __**your sister**__ has done more to me than you can imagine. She just doesn't know it yet._" More lightning hit poor Kate, sending her reeling. Tears streamed down her pretty face.

Faith pounded the glass until her knuckles bled, staining her single glove an even darker red. She hated feeling vulnerable like this, feeling weak. But she was very protective of her sister, having saved her life several times in the past year alone.

Kate's movements were slowing, her eyes dimming. Faith was crying, too, helpless to save her own sister from a passive-aggressive overgrown CD player with an attitude problem.

Faith was seeing red (and not in a good Runner way) as her sister collapsed to the ground.

GLaDOS turned back to Faith, apparently satisfied now that Kate was no longer moving. "_Well now that __**she **__is taken care of, you might want to turn around. Wake up, you fat, lazy __**monster**__ of a woman._"

Behind the heartbroken woman, the second sleeping pod slid open with a hiss. Chell turned almost imperceptibly towards Faith.

"Faith?" she whispered.

It was Kate's voice.


End file.
